Time for a reality check

With the fearsomely heterosexual Peter Bazalgette (the former That's Life researcher who became Godfather to Big Brother) now sitting on the board of Channel 4, I've been asking myself whether it's possible for television to sink any lower.

I think it might be, if someone commissions my new reality show, inspired by the craze among gullible cancer-ridden Californian billionaires for having their bodies frozen by cryogenics companies, in the hope that they can be thawed out again in the distant future, once scientists have developed a cure for their illness.

The process costs millions of dollars, but it occurred to me that there are plenty of gullible, cancer-ridden, poor people in this country who'd happily let a TV company cryogenically preserve their bodies in a chiller cabinet, and willingly enter the "Big Freezer", but here's the catch.

Every week, viewers will vote for their least-favourite stiff (using the red button on their handset), and each Friday the losing corpse will be evicted from the Big Freezer, and left outside to thaw in an undignified mush of melting eyeballs, brains, and synovial slush, before oozing ignobly across the studio floor.

Okay, it's probably better suited to daytime television (where undignified mush and slush are pretty much the norm) than to prime time, but it's no worse an idea than dozens of other Big Brother-inspired clones.

Which brings me to last night's Melting Pot (Carlton), a format that combines Mr Bazalgette's big idea with the concept behind Citizens, Radio 4's disastrous multi-ethnic house-sharing soap from the mid-Eighties (a series that showed all the signs of having been constructed not by a dramatist but by a sociologist).

"In the biggest experiment of its kind ever to hit London," boasted the voiceover in a doomed attempt to lend gravitas to banality, "we bring six young Londoners together from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds ... can they live together under one roof ?" Then it added that "the result will give us a fascinating insight", and I realised that the Trades Description people had already acquired enough evidence to keep them busy with this series for the rest of the decade.

The commercial success of Big Brother is due, in large measure, to its re-creation of the spirit of the first week of the first term at university, where young people are suddenly thrown together in a college or hall of residence, and are forced to interact. Melting Pot's producers have sought to intensify that experience by picking six more-or-less practising religious believers, to see whether Jewish Clare can rub along with Muslim Sabrina, and if Hindu Jassi and Portuguese Catholic Miguel can interact with the "black spiritualist actress" Carol.

There was also a white gentleman with "an eclectic mix of beliefs" who mistakenly thought he was God's gift to humanity, and who I won't name here because the lack of publicity will infuriate him far more than mere insults ever could.

He told us he'd been playing the drums for six years, but a brief clip of him attempting a paradiddle on a side drum had me shouting "what did you do with the money?" at my screen. What money? The money his mother used to give him for percussion lessons, of course.